This is the first part of the first short story from a collection I'll be publishing soon. I'm in the final stages of editing, now. Hope you enjoy it!
A Friend, Indeed
“Momma, there’s a dragon
in my wagon.”
Zoe blinked awake, rubbed
her eyes, and blinked some more. “What did you say, baby?” she murmured, voice
rough and scratchy with the nap she hadn’t intended to take when she’d laid
down.
Zoe hadn’t been sleeping
well. Neither had Tish, her daughter. Since Duane had deployed, she’d been
waking up with nightmares every few hours. Zoe don’t know what he did tucking
the little four-year-old girl in that was different from what she was doing, but she’d never had so
many.
“I said there’s a dragon
in my wagon. In the back yard. I was gonna go out and play, but it’s
there.” She popped a thumb in her mouth,
frowning worriedly.
The exhausted woman closed
her eyes and sighed. A dragon. In her wagon. Zoe supposed her daughter simply
wanted her momma out in the back yard with her, since she was feeling her
daddy’s absence. “Is it a friendly dragon, or an unfriendly one?” she asked,
humoring her little girl. Her daughter was only four, and this was the first
time her daddy had been gone longer than his two weeks a year training. She
wasn’t taking it well.
Hell, neither was Zoe.
Even without counting Tish’s nightmares, she had trouble falling and staying
asleep without the warm, breathing hulk of her husband next to her. Her eyes
were drifting closed again, against her will while Tish considered her
question.
“I don’t know, Momma, it’s
sleeping. I didn’t go near it. I didn’t even open the outside door—I saw it through
the glass when I opened the inside door to go into the back yard. It looks like
it’s only about the size of my floppy dog.” She blinked big brown eyes at her
mother, while Zoe tried desperately to keep her own eyes from falling shut.
“Tish, can you hand me my
shoes?” Zoe forced her eyes open wide, trying to wake up enough. “We can go
investigate.”
“I have them already,
Momma,” she said, holding out the canvas slip-on shoes Zoe kicked into for
grabbing the mail from the box down by the street.
She sighed and sat up,
shoving her thick, black hair that had escaped from her braid out of her eyes
with one hand, taking the shoes with the other to set on the floor so she could
shove her bare feet into them. “You said it was in the back, right? What color was the dragon?”
“It was the same green as
my juice,” she replied, reaching up and wrapping her small hand around Zoe’s
index and middle fingers. “It was really pretty in the yellow wagon, on the red
leaves.”
Zoe smiled down at her. “I
bet it was,” she said, thinking of that yellow Little People/Duplos plastic
thing Tish insisted had to go into the back yard. Duane really would have
preferred her to have a little red, metal wagon, like the one he’d grown up
playing with, but this one was what they’d found, and what she’d loved.
Since it was November, it
was full of dead leaves that she’d been using it to transport from one leaf
pile to another around the yard. “I wonder if the dragon is in your wagon
because it wants to sleep in your leaves,” Zoe mused.
She looked up at her
mother, brow scrunched and brown eyes thoughtful. “I dunno,” she said. “Could
be, if it doesn’t mind how scratchy leaves are. They are soft.”
The back yard had a really
high privacy fence surrounding it. It was one of the things Zoe and Duane had
liked about the house when they’d moved in: with the gate closed and locked, it
was safe for a little girl to go out and play by herself. Usually. And their
little girl was very independent. Usually.
Zoe opened the back door
and looked out. And blinked.
Tish hadn’t been making
things up to get her mother to go outside with her. There actually was a dragon in her wagon. It was about
the size of a basset hound. Same general shape, too, with a long body. Just…there
were also wings.
And it was looking at them, with golden eyes about
as mournful as a basset’s.
“Momma…the dragon looks sad,” Tish observed.
“I noticed,” Zoe said
absently. “Stay here.”
“Okay,” she said softly.
She opened the back storm
door and stepped out on the top step, closing the door carefully behind her.
And really looked at the dragon, her
arms crossed. She didn’t go any closer. It dropped its head and whined,
wiggling in the wagon. The dragon was heavy enough to rock it on its wheels,
plastic creaking ominously.
It sounded like the
bassets Zoe had known—both the one she’d grown up with, and the one that they’d
had until Tish had turned two—used to when they wanted scritches. That had to
be why she went down and sat on the bottom step, about six feet from her
daughter’s little plastic wagon full of dead maple leaves.
The dragon…the dragon
hopped out of the wagon, and slunk over to her, creeping close to the ground
even considering its short legs, and kind of sidling a little. As soon as it
got close enough, it went belly down and crept the rest of the way before
sitting up and laying its head on her knee. It looked up at her mournfully,
then up at where Tish was standing, hands and face pressed to the glass of the
door. And it whined again, and then nudged its head under her hand, just like a
dog would, when it wanted to be stroked.
So, Zoe obliged, stroked its
bright green snout, up to its brow ridges. The dragon’s jaw fell open, a bright
red, forked tongue falling sideways out its mouth. Like a dog’s, just…forked.
Its breath was hotter than she expected, considering she was currently petting
and scratching a four-footed creature with scales. Not hot, like threatening
fire, just hot like a mammal’s.
Even though it was clearly
reptile-like, it was definitely not a reptile. Really lizard-like, low-slung
with scales, just…warm-blooded. Maybe more like a bird? But…birds had two legs and wings, not four. And
feathers.
Zoe shook her head, trying
to think past the exhausted fog as she looked at the creature begging for
affection, and eyeing her daughter with longing. Not a bird. Not a lizard,
either, despite the four legs and scales. And wings? So, six limbs, and warm
blooded, but otherwise looking like a lizard. She really didn’t know what to make of it, but could tell it was happy
with the attention.
“You like that, huh?” she
said, rubbing around a weird, ragged-looking ear. Not like a dog’s, but not the
exposed membrane of a reptile, nor the feather-covered membrane of a bird.
Just…weird. Scaly and floppy. It leaned hard into the rubbing and…grumbled
wasn’t quite the right word. One hind leg started thumping.
Zoe couldn’t help but
smile. She glanced up to where Tish was dancing in impatience, but staying in
the house like a good girl. “Come on out, honey, but go slow,” she said.
The dragon, after all, had
very, very sharp predator’s teeth. And even if it was acting like a dog, it wasn’t one.
It whined again as the
door came open, and closed very quietly. Trembled as she came slowly down the
steps on the other side of Zoe from the dragon. And then, the dragon crawled across her lap to shove its head
into her daughter’s arms, and try to cuddle with both of them at once.
And Zoe could tell why the
plastic wagon had been creaking: the dragon weighed around half again more than
her four year old.
Tish’s delighted giggle
had the dragon jerking away to gallop around the back yard in sheer joy, which
let Zoe get a better look at it. It was long and low, with short legs like a
basset. It stretched its stubby wings out to help it keep its balance in the
turns.
She wondered where it came
from, and if it could fly.
It wound up crawling up
under Tish’s arm and draping its front half over her lap, nudging against her
cheek and chin with that smooth snout. And she cuddled the dragon, cooing
happily as it blinked and smiled at her, bright red, forked tongue hanging from
one side of its mouth. Zoe couldn’t help but smile, and reach down to scratch
behind the dragon’s ear again. It grunted and started thumping the step with a
hind leg, disarming Zoe further, the more it acted like a dog.
Tish smiled up at her,
brown eyes bright, and dimples showing. “Momma, can we keep it?”
She hesitated. The dragon
whined, climbing half over Tish’s lap to nuzzle Zoe’s arm and add hopeful eyes
to Tish’s request. Zoe sighed. “I suppose,” she said hesitantly. “We can keep
the dragon for as long as it will stay.”
It licked her face. With
raw meat-smelling breath. She sighed, wiping the rather slimy slobber off—there
honestly wasn’t much—and pushed up to her feet. “I’m going to get a chair,” she
said, “and a bowl for water.”
Both were just inside the
back door. If either had been much further away, she’d not have gone for them. Because
she’d been raised knowing you didn’t leave a child unsupervised with any animal
for long at all.
They had the supplies to
get a dog—they’d had a dog for a while, and then she’d passed. She’d been a
great dog. Zoe wished, in a way, that Tish had been old enough to remember her,
but in another, she was glad that Tish didn’t miss her dog for long. They’d
either thrown away or donated most of the things they’d had for the dog, but
not all of them. The things they still had would be about the right size for a
basset-hound-sized dragon…she thought.
Zoe still wasn’t convinced
she wasn’t hallucinating. Dragons weren’t real. Couldn’t be real. Because it
was scaled like a lizard, but warm-blooded like a mammal. Or bird. Just with
four legs. And a pair of wings, so six limbs, total. It acted like a dog, but she couldn’t quite get past the differences. The
critter was strange.
The phone rang, while she
was getting the bowl and the umbrella chair next to the back door. There was a
handset and charger base just inside the kitchen, next to the stove, and she
ducked in to grab it and answer. “Coffman’s residence, Zoe speaking,” she said,
pinning the handset between her shoulder and ear.
“Zoe, it’s Mom.” She hesitated. “I hate to ask you this, but
has there been anything…strange…going on?”
She thought wryly of the
dragon in the back yard. “Not much, no,” she said. “I do have a four-year-old with a vivid imagination who’s upset that her
daddy’s been gone for a month, and has no idea when he’ll be back, and a bad
case of prego-mush-brain, but other than that?
Nothing terribly strange.”
Just
the dragon in the back yard that shouldn’t exist,
she thought.
Her mom hummed. Then
realized what Zoe had said. “Prego-mush-brain?
Are you pregnant? Again?”
“You make it sound like
I’m pregnant so often,” Zoe said drily. “This is only the second time.”
“But…but Duane isn’t there,” she said.
“He’s not been gone that long,” Zoe replied tartly, offended.
“That wasn’t what I
meant,” she lamented. “Does he know?”
Zoe carried the bowl and
chair and phone out in the back yard. Set the bowl down, and filled it with
water. “Mom. He’s been gone a month. I just started the second trimester. He
was with me for the first appointment, and saw and heard the bean’s heartbeat,
and saw it jumping around on the portable ultrasound screen they brought in
when they couldn’t find it with the Doppler. I am not scheduled for the big
sonogram for another two weeks.”
“Why didn’t you tell me
sooner?” she demanded.
Zoe sighed, pinching the
bridge of her nose. “When did I tell you about my pregnancy with Tish?” Tish
was bouncing around the back yard, giggling, and jumping into the piles of
leaves she’d gathered. The green dragon bounced around behind her, moving like
an extra-large ferret, and piling into the leaves after her, shoving its head
down and flipping leaves into the air.
It was so cute it damn
near gave her cavities. And it was one of the first times in the past two weeks
Tish had played so happily and enthusiastically.
“Halfway through your
second trimester, when you had started showing and couldn’t hide it anymore,”
she replied acidly.
“No, Mom. Halfway through
my second trimester, when the dangers of miscarriage dropped to nearly
nothing,” Zoe pointed out. “You know. When you wouldn’t have your heart broken
by losing another grandchild, like you did with Steve’s wife’s baby they lost
right after they told you?”
She went silent for a
moment. Then, “Oh. I see. Well. I guess that teaches me to make
assumptions.” Her voice was
apologetic—Zoe knew that was probably all she’d get, since she wasn’t her
mother’s darling youngest son who was perfect in every way. In her mother’s
sight.
But only there. Everywhere
else, Zoe’s little brother was a flaky twit, who should thank God every day he’d
managed to marry so far above his worth.
“What kind of strangeness
were you calling about, anyway?” she asked, after she’d let her mother brood a
bit.
“Oh. Not much, really,”
she said hesitantly. “Only…your brother called, and swore up, down, and
sideways, he’d seen horse with a horn, running around with a herd of deer. I
was wondering if he was on something, or if he’d actually seen
something…unusual.”
“You mean mythological,”
Zoe said flatly. “I’d say it was safer to assume he was on something until you
get verification otherwise.”
“It’s one of the reasons I
called you,” she explained, matter of fact. “You always have your head on
straight, and you’d be more likely to know one way or the other.”
Zoe sighed. “Mom, Tish is
in the back yard. I really need to go.”
“Call me later, and tell
me how you’re doing,” she demanded.
“Tired as hell, but the
queasy is fading,” she said. “I’ll call sometime soon, when she’s gone down for
a nap.”
Zoe found herself holding
a phone giving her a fast beep as her mother hung up without saying goodbye,
like she always did. She had this superstition that actually saying goodbye was bad luck, and would
end with someone’s death.
She rolled her eyes, and
leaned the umbrella chair against the house, thinking about what else they
still had for a dog that might work for a dragon. Or what it might need.
Shelter. A food dish. A collar? Probably
not that. Beds, bedding. Probably not a kennel for the house, either.
Shelter first. Zoe
frowned, scratched her head while she tried to think, and then remembered where
the dog house was: in someone else’s yard after they’d set it on the curb. She
would have to either build or buy a new one, if the dragon decided to stay with
them for long. And if the dragon spent much time outside.
The pillow, bedding, and
toys would need to be replaced. They’d tossed the old stuff since it’d been old
and worn when the dog had passed away. So Zoe would need to buy everything new.
The dragon galloped along
after Tish, using its wings, now and then, to help it make a turn, or to keep
it on its feet after a jump over a toy. Tongue hanging out of the side of its
mouth, just like a dog.
Tish finally got tired,
and went over to her favorite spot to sit, over in a small hollow beneath the
spindly little maple tree, and flopped down. The dragon followed, curling
around behind her with its head under her hand, and sighed as she started
petting it. She scooched down to lay against the dragon, twisting over onto her
side, murmuring to it. Zoe couldn’t hear what she was saying, but the dragon
seemed to be listening intently.
Zoe got up, then paused
and squinted toward the sun, thinking about the time. “Tish, it’s time to go in
for a while,” she called.
“Can I bring Buddy?” she
called back, climbing to her feet.
“Why did you call it
Buddy?”
“Buddy isn’t an it,” she said firmly. “Buddy’s a boy. And it’s his name.”
Zoe looked down at the
dragon. There wasn’t any visible cue of sex, so she had to ask. “How do you know that?”
“He told me. In my head.”
“Of course,” Zoe murmured
to herself. “How stupid of me.” She eyed the dragon’s feet. The talons were
blunt, and didn’t look like they’d damage the floors any more than the dog’s
had, so she shrugged. “Why not. We’ll see if Buddy can be a house-friend.”
She squealed, hugged the
dragon (apparently named Buddy, now) around its long, scaly neck, and scampered
for the house, the dragon happily gallumphing behind her, pausing to look up at
Zoe as she held open the door. “It’s okay,” she said, nodding toward the
interior of the house. “You can go in. Just no crapping on the floor.”
